Indeed, words are not always sufficient to express the deep states of the human soul. ‘SOUND‘ is one of the admirable proofs that confirms this, giving us an intimate and intense experience about the fragility of people experiencing the alteration of their own senses. In fact, this is perhaps the most important aspect of Tawan Bazemore’s short film – the existence of human being as pure sensory experience. Thus, without attacking an obvious philosophical support, the director captures a fragment of the fate of a woman confronted with hearing loss following a car accident, subtly pursuing how the individual’s contact with reality through the sense organs is the fundamental basis of the human soul, the essential matrix through which the individual accesses deeper areas of their own self, in order to experience, for example, the materialization of the notion of beauty. This short film orbits, therefore, around the idea of beauty or ephemerality, concentrating all of its energy into a touching and tragic visual and acoustic periplus, hiding in the subtext a vibrant metaphor of the human condition, depicting in only a few minutes the sensorial apogee corresponding to a revealing and overwhelming aesthetic moment and the self-mutilative emotional decline of a character whose senses turn against her, transforming her into a ghost captive in a hostile body. Hearing and seeing – the essential coordinates of this project – materialize here both in flashes of beatitude and anguish, in a syncretic poem that combines images of photographic precision with musical impulses ranging from euphoria to stridency as in an X-ray of the human psyche that goes beyond the lexical cover of each of us.
Victim of a car accident that has deeply affected her hearing, a photographer escapes from her everyday life to explore the beauty of nature. The almost paradisiacal landscape she wants to capture with the camera has a such invigorating effect on her that the protagonist manages to capture the vibrations around her and even the music. But this moment of pure happiness anticipates an unimaginable anguish.
Avoiding the conventional epic structure of a short film, Tawan Bazemore accesses the stylistics of a poetic cinema that, by abandoning the word as a supreme means of expression (except for a few seconds, this short film is completely lacking dialogue), plunges inside the twisted mental of the victim who has lost sensory integrity with such overwhelming suggestive force that the spectator merges with the protagonist into an inseparable entity. The complicity settling between the viewer and the character becomes a defining link in the exploration of the human substrate of a person addicted to beauty, for whom the total loss of the ability to perceive harmony becomes fatal. Thus, the audio-visual alchemy orchestrated by the director varies between music and noise, between chromatic balance and stridency, making of ‘SOUND’ a thrilling organic experience about the fragility of the human being, whose senses can open both the gates of paradise and hell.
For the suggestiveness with which the director depicts the emotional fluctuations of a soul deprived of senses, for the poeticism with which the director composes from colours and sounds the intimate universe of a character in search of beauty, for the talent through which the main actress manages to embody the painful path of the human being placed between ecstasy and agony, ‘SOUND’ was awarded with the Film of the Month distinction in the June 2019 edition of TMFF.
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